Taren can wait. The patrol can rot.
I dive into the tunnel.
The maintenance corridor is a throat of stale water. It reeks of neglect, of waste and decay. It is the city's digestive tract, a place for things the bright world has finished with. It's the perfect place for Vaelis to flush his life away.
I follow. His red fins are blood in the water ahead, a flicker of impossible life in the suffocating dark. He's swimming with a desperate speed I have never seen, not even during our most brutal training sessions. He moves as if he is being hunted, or as if he is chasing something only he can see.
The tunnel ends, and we spill out into the open ocean, far below the main patrol routes.
The cold is a physical blow. It bites through my guard-issue leathers, making my gills ache with every pull of water. I hate this. The endless, uncaring dark in every direction. The death of order. The death of safety.
Vaelis doesn't even hesitate.
He drives himself downward, heading straight for the abyss.
I shadow him, hiding in the shelf's gloom. He reaches the boundary markers, the exact knots I tied with my own hands last week.
He slides through a gap in the kelp I never knew existed, his movement fluid, practiced.
He crosses.
The frantic rhythm of my own pulse is a violence against my ribs. Turn around, I will him, my hands clenching so hard my nails cut into my palms.
You are a Vael. You are meant for light. You do not belong out there.
I follow.
Instinct screams to stop, to flee toward the light and warmth. But the thought of Vaelis alone in that crushing dark is worse. My heavy tail moves. I follow his faint trail, tasting the water.
It tastes of ozone. And something else.
Musk. Iron. Old blood.
Predator.
The scent is faint, but it triggers an alarm. There is a shark in the water.
Panic flares. Vaelis swims toward a shark. He must not smell the danger over the sulfur and his own bravado.
I kick harder. I have to reach him. I have to grab him by his hair and drag him back.
Vaelis stops stops on a flat ridge of barren rock, hovering in the open, exposed to the dark.
And he is not alone.
I brake hard, muscles screaming. I hide behind black sponges. My breath comes in rattling gasps.
I peer around the rock.
The monster is not the giant of nursery tales. That is my first observation.
Yet, despite his average stature, he possesses terrifying mass. A condensed engine of pale muscle, heavily scarred. Its fin is jagged. Its tail is powerful enough to snap a spine in a single blow. It is a Basalt-Kin. An eater from the abyss.
And it hovers less than an arm's length from Vaelis.
I reach for the hunting knife at my belt, hand shaking. Too late. It will strike. It will tear him apart.
But it does not strike.
